Killings

by Calvin Trillin

  One person Piasecny didn’t mind fighting with was his wife, Doris. Apparently, the Piasecny marriage was violent from the beginning. Doris Piasecny, who worked as a secretary in downtown Manchester, had grown up in a miserable river-bottom neighborhood known as Skeag Village. She had a longing for material objects that strained Piasecny’s income and his temper. At one time, the family owned three Cadillacs. Hank Piasecny was ferociously jealous. He drank a lot. His wife took a lot of pills. Terry Piasecny remembers from childhood that when his father’s spirits were high—particularly in a hunting camp in the St. John River valley, in Maine—“you could really be on the top of the world with him.” More often, his spirits were low. Arguments between him and Doris would build up to the point at which their daughter, Susan, would suddenly burst out of the house to call for help. The Manchester police came out regularly to calm Piasecny down. At least once, he was convicted of assaulting his wife. “I used to hope that one of them would die,” Susan Piasecny said later. “So it would all end.”

  In 1963, after some separations and some false starts toward divorce and some contempt citations against Piasecny for violating a court order barring him from the house, Doris Piasecny was finally granted a divorce. She got the house and most of the possessions. He set up housekeeping in the back of Hank’s Sport Center. Terry, who had married young, had been away from home for some time. Susan was in her second year at Colby College. Although Hank Piasecny had seemed unwilling to accept the divorce, he and his wife appeared to get along better divorced than married. She even went out with him occasionally. She also went out with other people. One night, around Christmas of 1963, she invited some people who had been drinking at a bar called the Venice Room back to the house for a nightcap. Among them was a bachelor named John Betley—a prominent Manchester architect who, after leaving his house late that evening to garage his car, had decided to drop in to the Venice Room for a drink. Eventually, the gathering at Doris Piasecny’s house began to break up. John Betley and Doris Piasecny were left alone in the house. Not long after that, according to the way the police later pieced together what must have happened, Hank Piasecny emerged from his hiding place, a kitchen knife in his hand, and killed both his wife and John Betley. Doris Piasecny was stabbed eleven times. John Betley was stabbed thirteen times.

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  In New Hampshire, the legal definition of insanity is rather broad. To accept a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, a judge or jury need not be persuaded that the defendant was unable to distinguish between right and wrong but merely that his crime was the product of mental illness. A couple of hours after the murders, Hank Piasecny was found in the back of Hank’s Sport Center, having smashed his truck into a turnpike guardrail nearby. He was drunk and raving and holding a deer rifle that he managed to fire once before passing out. He was later examined by a prominent Boston psychiatrist hired by the defense. He was examined by psychiatrists acting for the state. It was agreed that Hank Piasecny was legally insane—a paranoid schizophrenic. “Mr. Piasecny has always been a rather seriously disturbed person with masochistic, passive, dependent, narcissistic trends,” one of the state’s psychiatrists said. “Often he has very effectively repressed realities which were incompatible with his deep need to be recognized as a real man by his wife and a substantial person by the community.”

  The state accepted Hank Piasecny’s plea, and he was committed to the New Hampshire Hospital at Concord—“for life until or unless earlier discharged, released or transferred by due course of law.” The state attorney general’s office, which handles all murder prosecutions in New Hampshire, could argue that, the state’s own psychiatrists having found Piasecny insane, bringing him to trial instead of accepting the plea would have been fruitless. The suspicion lingered in Manchester, though, that Piasecny had escaped the penitentiary or the electric chair for reasons having nothing to do with psychiatry. Rumors had circulated about the murders from the beginning. Although John Betley and Doris Piasecny were found fully clothed, there were people in Manchester who insisted the bodies were nude and mutilated. It was said that the party at Doris Piasecny’s that night had included an important judge, or perhaps more than one judge. It was said that Hank Piasecny’s plea of insanity had been accepted because of a cover-up, or because of influence exerted by some of his old hunting buddies. There were a lot of people in Manchester who thought that Hank Piasecny had managed to get away with murder.

  After spending a year in a maximum-security section of the hospital, Piasecny settled into a relatively comfortable life in Concord. His brothers and sister, who were trying to maintain his shop for him, visited regularly. Terry brought the grandchildren. Piasecny’s children had apparently chosen to believe that he had no idea what he was doing when he stabbed their mother and John Betley; some of his brothers had apparently chosen to believe that he may not have committed the crime at all. The hospital has a pitch-and-putt golf course, and Piasecny spent a lot of time on it. Except for some problems early in his stay with an inmate named John McGrath, who had been committed after killing several members of his own family, Piasecny seemed to have adjusted relatively well to institutional life. Two years after he was committed, his lawyer petitioned for his release, arguing that he was no longer a danger to himself or others.

  One of the state-hospital psychiatrists had some reservations about approving the release. His report said, “I cannot in all good conscience in any way state that the patient represents no further risk to the community whatsoever.” In general, though, the psychiatrists agreed that Hank Piasecny, surely insane at the time of the murders, had recovered to the point of being able to live in his own community with the aid of some regular psychiatric care. The state attorney general’s office opposed even a gradual release. John Betley’s sister wrote the judge in the case a bitter letter, hinting that Piasecny had been protected from the start and expressing outrage that the court could sanction the release of “such an evil person.” When the release was indeed sanctioned, the attorney general appealed to the state supreme court—unsuccessfully. On August 6, 1966, two and a half years after he was arrested for killing his wife and John Betley, Hank Piasecny returned to Manchester, a free man.

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  The life Piasecny settled into seemed to be calmer than the one he had left. After a couple of years, an entrance for the interstate sliced through the property of Hank’s Sport Center, and Piasecny did not attempt to find a new location. He went to work for the boat store run by Arthur Pellenz, a friendly competitor from earlier times. The three-Cadillac days were over for Piasecny, but he seemed to get by with a simpler life. When Terry moved his family to a small house on a river an hour north of Manchester, Hank Piasecny became a regular Sunday visitor—fly-fishing in the river, taking Terry’s eldest son into the woods for his first buck in the same way he had taken Terry. Even without three Cadillacs, he was still a man who might show up at the wake of a prominent citizen, and at Pellenz’s boat store he was still a man who spoke bluntly. But “peaceful” was a word sometimes used about the life Piasecny led in Manchester—except when it came to his relationship with his daughter.

  It is often said in Manchester that Susan Piasecny was a talented and remarkably intelligent girl who simply never recovered from the shock of her mother’s murder. In high school, she did appear to be the sort of daughter who would make any father proud—a fine-looking girl who seemed to have a natural gift for music and art and athletics and scholarship. She was an honor student. She was a good enough athlete to teach skiing and riding and golf. Even before that day in 1963 when the Colby dean met her after class to tell her there was trouble at home, though, there had been episodes that would have surprised anyone in Manchester who took Susan Piasecny to be a model of achievement. When she was fourteen, she arrived home hours late from a babysitting job and reported having been abducted—a story the police eventually decided she might have made up. When she was sixteen, she was taken to a hospital in Nashua, temporarily unabl
e to speak. After her mother’s death, she was a patient in a Massachusetts mental hospital for several weeks. She left Colby, and left another college after that. Still, she eventually finished college, got married, and, in the fall of 1967, entered the medical school of the University of Vermont.

  After two starts, she withdrew from medical school for good. Her marriage was deteriorating. Depressions had forced her to seek help again at mental hospitals. Shortly after her marriage broke up, she was found unconscious in a small New Hampshire town, apparently having been beaten or tossed from a car. She implied that her husband had hired thugs to beat her up. The Manchester police were not convinced. The incident reminded them of the babysitting abduction. It also reminded them of the reports years before that a local golfer who had become involved with Susan when she was a teenager had been beaten up by friends of Hank Piasecny. In 1970, Susan Piasecny entered the New Hampshire Hospital at Concord, depressed and suicidal. She remained there for three years. Shortly after her release, she married a fellow patient named Edward Hughes. Shortly after that, it was reported that Edward Hughes had walked into the bathroom of their apartment, slit his throat with a Gillette razor blade, and walked back into the living room to die in the presence of his wife.

  After her second husband’s death, Susan Hughes worked now and then at one nursing home or another, but her life seemed dominated by pills and bad checks and petty brushes with the law and fights with her father. They tried living together for a while—renting the small brick bungalow Terry had left when he moved away—but they finally had to split up. Living in the same house with his daughter, Hank Piasecny apparently started seeing in her the mannerisms that had angered him about his wife. In his anger, he may have sometimes called her Doris instead of Susan. After Susan moved out, there were periods when her father swore he wanted nothing more to do with her. She was regularly in trouble—forging prescriptions for pills or stealing from friends or bouncing checks. The girl who had once seemed capable of doing anything she chose to do was considered by her uncles and her aunts and even her own father a persistent disgrace to the Piasecny name. In June of 1977, Hank Piasecny and his daughter had a violent argument—he may have hit her or shoved her or shaken her—and he said he never wanted to see her or hear from her again.

  On the Friday before last Labor Day weekend, Susan Hughes’s name appeared in the court column of the Manchester Union Leader. The item said, “Sue E. Piasecny, 35, of 367 Hanover St., also known as Susan Hughes, entered no plea to two counts of forgery, both felony complaints.” She telephoned the reporter responsible, demanding to know why he had included her maiden name—a mention, she said, that was likely to drive her father to distraction, or violence. That night, she told some friends visiting her apartment that she feared her father might kill her because of his belief that she had dragged the family name through the mud once again. She showed them a knife she intended to use to defend herself. She showed them newspaper clippings about her mother’s murder.

  Early the next morning—Saturday of Labor Day weekend—the police went to Hank Piasecny’s house. Susan Hughes had phoned to say that her father was so distraught she was afraid he might harm himself. They found Piasecny lying facedown in the hallway. Half of his head had been blown off. A shotgun was at his side. The headline in the next day’s Union Leader said, HENRY (HANK) PIASECNY SHOOTS HIMSELF DEAD. The lead-in headline said, CHARGED IN ’63 SLAYINGS. Most people in Manchester figured that the guilt had finally caught up with Hank Piasecny—that he hadn’t got away with murder after all. One or two of his brothers were said to believe that Hank Piasecny’s daughter had driven him to his death. Susan Hughes herself had another theory: she said her father had been murdered.

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  She did not stop at merely offering the theory. She called the county attorney. She hounded the police. She suggested some suspects—John McGrath, for instance, the murderer at the state hospital, who had escaped several years before. Once, she pounded on the door of the police chief’s office, shouting that her father had been murdered but no one would do anything about it. The police were unimpressed. Susan Hughes, after all, had come in with some wild tales in the past. Finally, three and a half weeks after Hank Piasecny died, his daughter, claiming reasonable grounds to suspect that he had met his death by unlawful means, petitioned the superior court for a warrant to have the body disinterred and an autopsy performed. The petition made a claim that Susan Hughes had often made to the police—that there was a second bullet hole in her father’s body. “In the early morning of September 5, 1977,” the petition said, “Susan E. Hughes went to the funeral home and examined the body of her father, observing a puncture wound in the left chest which she was able to probe to a depth of 2½ to 3 inches.” The petition was granted. The autopsy was performed. A hole was found on the left side of Hank Piasecny’s chest. A .22 slug was found in his body.

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  When photographs taken at the death scene were reexamined, it turned out that the second bullet hole was not the only suspicious detail that had been overlooked. Although Piasecny’s head wound would have killed him instantly, the body was at least ten feet away from the pool of blood. The gun was in an awkward position across the back of his right arm; the wound in his head was on the left instead of the right. It may be that the police quickly assumed that what they found was a suicide because that is what they were prepared to find. People in Manchester had been half expecting Hank Piasecny to commit suicide for years, after all, and those expectations had been brought to the surface by the phone call from Piasecny’s daughter. The possibility of reexamining the scene itself no longer existed by the time of the autopsy. The house had been cleaned. The police picked up one lead, though, during conversations at the autopsy: Susan Hughes, it turned out, had told the county attorney and a few other people about the second wound the day after the murder, before her trip to the funeral home. It was true that she had been at the death scene shortly after Piasecny’s body was discovered, but the police who were there agreed on one detail: the body was covered, and Susan Hughes had no opportunity to examine it.

  A month passed before Susan Hughes admitted having shot her father—shot him first in the chest with a .22 she had stolen from her cousin, and then in the head with his own shotgun. A lot of theories were offered in Manchester as to why, having got away with it, she instigated an investigation that would lead to her arrest. There was a theory that she could collect Hank Piasecny’s insurance only if he died by means other than suicide. In fact, Piasecny had very little life insurance, and its beneficiary was Terry. A lot of people thought, of course, that Susan Hughes simply wanted to be punished and had found herself frustrated by the police department’s acceptance of a patently sloppy attempt to give the shooting the appearance of a suicide. Some people believed that her real interest was in showing up the police of Manchester—her adversaries for years—or in defiantly dragging the Piasecny name through the mud for the benefit of her uncles and aunts. There were those who thought Susan Hughes might have just wanted attention.

  She was examined several times by psychiatrists. A psychiatrist for the state—the same psychiatrist who had been in charge of examining Hank Piasecny for the state in 1964—said she was “suffering from a schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type.” It was the same diagnosis he had offered for her father; he testified, in fact, that the trouble might have been inherited. The assistant attorney general in the case, Peter Heed, is normally reluctant to accept pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity. Because of a recent New Hampshire Supreme Court decision, the state can be required to prove beyond a reasonable doubt every two years that an inmate of the state hospital would be a danger to himself or others if released. That burden of proof being almost impossible to meet in the case of anyone who has behaved reasonably well at the hospital, a defendant who is committed for life is more likely to remain committed for two years. Heed did, though, decide to accept a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity
from Susan Hughes. It was not the psychiatric reports that persuaded him. In a recent murder case that Heed tried, all four psychiatrists who took the stand had testified that the defendant was insane, and the jury had found him sane—and guilty. Heed says he accepted Susan Hughes’s plea because he believes her to be insane, and believes that any juror would find her insane no matter what psychiatrists testified. “She had committed the perfect crime,” he said recently. “Her very own action led to her arrest. Susan Hughes was the first person I’ve dealt with who really comes under what the insanity defense was meant to encompass.” Susan Hughes was sent to the New Hampshire Hospital—“for life until or unless earlier discharged, released or transferred by due process of law.”

  The verdict did not cause the grumbling that had taken place when Hank Piasecny was sent to the state hospital, but there are, of course, people in Manchester who do not believe Susan Hughes is insane. Some of her uncles apparently believe her to be simply evil. Some members of Edward Hughes’s family are now wondering out loud whether Hughes committed suicide after all. A former member of the attorney general’s office who did not believe Hank Piasecny’s plea should have been accepted seems to feel the same way about Susan Hughes’s plea. “Of course she wanted to get caught,” he said recently. “But that’s not insanity—that’s a sense of guilt. A lot of murders get solved that way.”

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  In the two months between her father’s death and her confession, Susan Hughes had seemed more and more insane to the people observing her—distraught, obsessive, sometimes hysterical. Once, she went to the police station to show detectives some graffiti she said someone had printed on her car in lipstick—a warning that she would be the next victim. For a while, most of her energies seemed to be taken up with an attempt to persuade an acquaintance to confess to the murder. Now she seems rational and intelligent, sitting in a dayroom at the New Hampshire Hospital—a large room with green linoleum floors and color pictures cut from magazines on the wall and the sounds of afternoon television and desultory Ping-Pong broken now and then by some patient’s sudden outburst. Discussing the death of her father with a visitor not long ago, she said she had shot him in self-defense, then shot him again with his own shotgun for seemingly contradictory reasons that didn’t seem contradictory in the shock of it all—to put him out of pain if he was still alive, perhaps, or to make certain he wouldn’t recover and kill her. “If I had really wanted to make it look like a suicide,” she said, “I would have rolled him over and shot him in the chest to obliterate the hole.” She said she had insisted on the murder investigation because she believed the family—Terry’s family—would prefer to think that Hank Piasecny died a murder victim rather than a suicide. She said she had not believed that the investigation would lead to her arrest. She talked about growing up as the daughter of Hank and Doris Piasecny—about being boarded out during the week as a child while both parents were working, about hearing the arguments start to build and knowing she would have to run for help, about discussions during the last year of Doris Piasecny’s life as to whether or not her husband would kill her. “I’ve talked about all the bad things,” she said at the door, as the visitor waited for the attendant to bring the key. “But there was love, too.”